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So much of these theories seem humane and intuitive, but the practice of them is where people trip up. It reminds me of world class athletes who look so effortless but the # of hours to attain that muscle memory is fantastic. Practicing the small batch things you can control lead to higher order change.

Our team serves several programs of work. For the most part each program runs its own board and moves at its own pace. All the programs come together at our staging and deployment workflow – using a common set of hardware and people.

One program had decided to make each and every one of its features fixed-date. That put the whole system out of balance as their work trumped other standard class items when it hit that common staging/deployment workflow.

Because the work was all visualized and service classes had been explained to folks, the natural inclination to put a fixed date on all the other programs work was avoided. Folks realized how disruptive the one program had been and realized it wouldn’t get any better by mimicking it.

Instead we got all the program leaders together and got agreement that it was a problem, and then got agreement on when fixed date service classes should be used.

From now on when someone puts a fixed date item into any program’s backlog, it frequently prompts a “Ok, but at what cost to work in this program, and in other programs” discussion.